Affiliate Marketing is Great for Beginners

If you’ve ever thought about having a web-based business, you may have felt overwhelmed with the idea of having to stock, sell, and ship things to a worldwide customer base. But the thing is, you can make money online without creating an online store and without dealing with all the trappings of a traditional business. The way you can do this is by joining an affiliate program and featuring affiliate products on your website. If you’re just starting out as a potential internet business, you should strongly consider joining an affiliate program. It’s one of the easiest things for a beginner to get into when it comes to web based businesses.

You may be unfamiliar with the concept of affiliate marketing, but it’s pretty simple. When you sign up or register as an affiliate with online merchants, you get paid commissions when you drive sales from your site to their site. Different merchants structure their affiliate programs differently. Some pay you for every click that comes from your site, some pay you whenever someone from your site clicks and signs up for their online newsletter, and some pay you for actual sales that come through your site. You don’t have to have any stock of your own or worry about shipping the actual product to the customer. The merchant’s site does all that. You just send the merchant potential customers.

There are thousands of online business that offer affiliate programs. Some have a great track record while others do now. Do your research and choose your merchants wisely. They will be your business partners. If you send traffic to a merchant that provides poor customer service or an inferior product, this will reflect on your business in the eyes of your users. People will remember that you recommended this business, product or service and could consider you guilty by association. If this happens, users may be less likely to return to your site or trust your recommendations again in the future.

You want a merchant you’ll trust with your web visitors. It helps if you choose a merchant that sells something you might actually be interested in yourself. You may even want to test the merchant personally by purchasing the product yourself before promoting it on your website. You can always return it later. How was your experience working with this merchant? Remember, the way they treat you is the way they will treat the visitors you send them.

You also want to select products and services that appeal to the typical visitor to your site. If you’re running a website about dogs, don’t choose a cat toy affiliate to hook up with. Pick something that you honestly think your visitors will be interested in. If you don’t, you’ll be wasting your own, the merchant’s and the potential customer’s time.

Once you’ve signed on as an affiliate, your job is basically the same as it ever was: increase traffic to your website with great content. The more traffic you get, the more potential you have for sending someone through to the merchant’s site, and the more you’ll make in the way of commissions. It’s not going to be instant overnight success, but you’d be surprised how well you can do with some time and effort.

Facebook Offering Businesses $500 to Monitor Their Phone Calls

I just received an email from Facebook offering one of my social media clients a $500 advertising coupon if he agrees to participate in Facebook’s Call Tracking Study.

The goal of the month-long study is “to understand how many phone calls local businesses receive as a result of their Facebook Page.”

What facebook wants my client to do is replace the phone number on their Facebook fanpage with the special Facebook issued tracking number. Calls to the number will still be routed to my client’s business. Facebook claims they are just “monitoring usage”. According to their website, “Facebook will primarily log the number of phone calls made from the special number on your page. We will not record or listen to your calls.”

Unfortunately the study is only open to a small group of businesses who have been invited to participate. No information was given as to what the criteria were for selecting my client’s business.

You can learn more about Facebook’s Call Tracking Study on their website.

Would you route your business phone calls through facebook and let them monitor them? I guess it depends on how many calls you receive from your facebook page. Maybe you should conduct a research study to find out.

Social Media vs Your Website

I found an interesting article tonight about the rising popularity of social media as compared with traditional websites. According to the Wall Street Journal, some large companies such as Starbucks and Coca-Cola receive up to 20 times as much traffic to their facebook pages as to their corporate websites.

I knew companies were increasingly utilizing social media websites such as facebook and twitter to connect with customers. I had no idea that in some cases these social media sites were outperforming these companies corporate websites… and to such an extent. I suppose it depends on the product, brand or service. In Starbucks case for example, what would be a compelling reason to visit the Starbucks corporate website? Compare this with the company’s facebook page. 600 million users, many of them presumably Starbucks customers, are already on facebook’s site. If Starbucks wants to connect with those users, they need to be there too.

The article goes on to point out the benefits to businesses of each method of online marketing, social media and your own website.

Benefits of Social Media

1. Inherently interactive.
2. Where people are spending time.
3. Easy to acquire users / fans.
4. Virality.

Benefits of Your Own Website

1. Control the design.
2. Own the data.
3. Targeting and personalization.
4. Reach all your audience.

Does your company have a facebook fan page? If you would like one, check out my web design company, Power Play Marketing and our social media marketing packages.

Here is a link to the complete article on bnet.com, Is It Time to Shut Down Your Website?

Website Traffic Tips: Yahoo Answers

Yahoo Answers is a great place to generate traffic to your sites, because no matter what niche or topic your website is about, there are probably people asking questions about it. If you can answer them effectively, it will help you get both direct traffic and long-term backlinks to your website. Let’s look at how to use it effectively.

The first thing to keep in mind is that you need to be able to provide some value. It’s a give-and-take situation – you’re giving useful information and in turn you’re “taking” traffic and backlinks.

If you approach it from a purely selfish point of view, it’s not going to work as well, and chances are your Yahoo Answers account will get suspended sooner or later (probably sooner!)

That means that you’re not going to include a link to your website in every single answer you post. You might include a link to other sites in some answers, or no link at all in others. You want your account to grow naturally. In other words, if someone from Yahoo was to review your answers, you don’t want every single one of them pointing back to your own website.

The most effective way to use Yahoo Answers is to spend some time on it every day. Search for questions in your market and find some that you can answer. Ideally, find the newest ones so you can be the first, or close to the first person to respond. The higher you are in the list of responses, the more traffic you’re going to get.

And ultimately, you want to have as many of your answers as possible chosen as the “best answer” because it will be shown right underneath the question from that point on.

When you answer a question today, if it’s chosen as the best one, it could generate traffic to your site for years to come.

When you answer a question, there’s a spot where you can enter a link to a website that provides more information about it. That is where you can include a link to your own site in some of the answers – not in the answer itself.

One good way to approach this is when you find a relevant question that you don’t already cover on your site, write a new blog post or article explaining the answer in some detail. Then provide a shorter summary on Yahoo Answers with a link to your new article.

This kills two birds with one stone – coming up with ideas for new content on your site and answering questions on Yahoo.

Website Traffic Tips: Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

Pay Per Click, also known as PPC, is one of the fastest ways to generate traffic to your website. The downside, of course, is that it will cost you money so you’ll need to be sure you either have some money to invest up front, or a way to make money from those visitors to cover the cost of your ads. Let’s look at how you can use pay per click marketing most effectively.

There are quite a few PPC sites, but the most widely used are Google Adwords and Yahoo/Bing adCenter. Facebook advertising is also growing quite fast so it’s another option to consider.

As a general rule, Adwords will be the most expensive place to run your ads, because they are the largest. That means there are more people competing for the ad space, driving up the costs. Yahoo/Bing is less expensive in most cases, but it will depend on the market you’re in to some degree.

Adwords also has some fairly strict policies, so you’ll need to be sure that you’re offering some real value to the people who click on your ads, and that your website meets all of Google terms of service.

One of the most important things about pay per click marketing is to be sure you’re targeting effective keywords in your ads. Generally, the more specific your keywords are, the better. And ultimately you want to find “buying” keywords – the ones that are used by people who are actively looking to buy something.

If you target your ads at general keywords for your market, it can generate a lot more traffic, but a lot of those people are just looking for information – they’re not necessarily going to convert into paying customers. While getting a lot of traffic sounds good in theory, it isn’t good if it just costs you a lot of money with no significant returns.

Another important factor for success with PPC marketing is good tracking. If you’re getting visitors from several sources, say articles that you’ve submitted, the search engines and Adwords, you need to know which of those visitors are generating revenue for you.

If the paid ads don’t generate enough to cover the cost, you’re losing money on them – even if the site is profitable overall. By tracking the different traffic sources through to the final conversions, you’ll know exactly where the money is being made.

There are a lot of horror stories about people losing a lot of money on PPC advertising. It doesn’t have to be that way, but you definitely need to make sure you understand how it works, what your risks are, and how to target the right people before you start spending any money.

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